You’re ascribing me a lot of views that I don’t have.
An example. Personal opinion. The so-called criminal justice system of the USA has a lot in common with slavery, and relatively to the population size probably has more of a negative effect on the quality of life of Americans than minority repression in China has on the Chinese. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
I drew this example and conclusion based on media sources in the free press of the West. One can draw some conclusions from that.
Ok good, but why you're assuming that there are no parallels to your case in "other dictatorships"? In Russia we saw people refusing the war, in China there i s work to fight corruption and expose the corrupts... in Iran there are pro west people and some public figures that publicly criticize the supreme leader and so. Whatever answer you have for this can be the answer for your case.
My whole point is, the free press of the west only free for the cases that doesn't hurt that much, and because of conflicts between the democrats and Republicans (a similar thing exists in other countries, like Iran). But for cases that matters there will be practically no alternative story (see: Ukraine war, Iraq war).
I don't know what part of the West you lived in during the Iraq war, but in my country, which is an enthusiastic NATO member, the newspapers hardly printed any opinion pieces that blatantly reflected the propaganda points of the US government.
They were quoted, of course, "weapons of mass destruction blah blah blah", but the continuous critical review was very skeptical towards the official US narrative, and was quick to point out the likelihood of forged intelligence reports and other sources that questioned the motive of the invasion. I myself went to a public protest against it at the time, and the prevailing public opinion was that the invasion was not justified. Tough luck; our opinion didn't matter but at least no one were beaten up or went to prison over it. Our tax money did not kill Iraqis.
I do understand where you're coming from, and I can agree with your sentiment to a certain extent. There is a double standard regarding certain "rubber hits the road" aspects of the top-level leadership in Western countries, that falls far short of democratic ideals. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have been hunted like rabid animals for merely revealing factual information that was relevant to public discourse. France, USA, others, have developed a governance structure that does not resemble well-functioning democracies, and the latter is dangerously close to an authoritarian shift. The USA literally tortured suspected terrorist collaborators with no judicial oversight. This is not an exhaustive list.
So certainly, there's plenty to criticize and some of it runs very deep. Human rights violations happen with some regularity. But freedom of speech and freedom of the press is not abolished. The rule of law applies. I will certainly point it out if this risks ceasing to be the case, first and foremost because that leads to a bad society to live in, but also because the culture that stems from these values is more economically powerful than one without them.
On Ukraine I'll just disagree with you. Russia's invasion is an imperialist military expansion. That kind of thing should only happen in history books. The rest of the world must use all safe means to prevent it from succeeding and setting precedent, and for the sake of existential risk also to avoid nuclear proliferation in small and exposed countries.
No one wants to share a long land border with a geopolitical adversary; I'd be happy to criticize the lack of statesmanship and realpolitik in managing Ukraine's NATO ambitions versus Russia's wish for security guarantees. But the war, or something like it, would have happened regardless. It's just a fig leaf. The core of the issue is Russian leadership's fear of Ukraine, like Poland and the Baltic states, setting an example of a peer culture succeeding with dramatically higher wealth growth under democratic values, that the inhabitants themselves decided to implement.
If I'm wrong, I'll admit it when history becomes clearer in 10 years.
[Edit: Following one of your points. Countries without democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech certainly and obviously have independent thinkers. Some of them are incredibly brave to voice their opinions in spite of sometimes brutal punishments. More so than all Western journalists. My commentary is on the societal environment and governance. But being susceptible to propaganda is universally human, and most people are not independent thinkers, regardless of where they grew up
Should also mention that I have huge respect for Russian culture and Russian cultural and scientific achievements. These comments are not a criticism of peoples and their cultures].
I'm not denying that under some circumstances you can find lot of impressive freedom of speech in the west.
The idea is that the outcome is not different in the causes that actually matters! Even your point about the Iraq war proves my point, despite all the fight back, the US was able to manufacture the consent and execute the plans, similar thing happened in the Syrian war and in many other places. Even in the Ukrainian war this is happening again, you don't need to be on the Russian side (and I'm not) to understand that there is manufactured consent in the whole western bloc to move forward with the war (you can view this war as pure Russian offence, or as Geo-political provocation by the US to fight Russia and even China to stop it's decline or something in between those extremes). Of Course you will find many anti US leftists and Pro Russian voices in the west, but those are demonized(even pointing some nuance can make you a Russian bot/agent) so they have no to little effect in the grand scheme of things.
I'm from a "third wold" country that have lot of freedom of speech, you can even curse many political leaders on the TV without consequences, but I know that this is not real freedom of speech because the power structures make this irrelevant mostly (not that I want to give up on this freedom).
At some point in the future, when the western bloc already declined in power enough this will be clear, we will be talking about how the freedom of speech and democracy was mostly a facade that hides the real power structures and didn't make big effect on the important causes of the world. Decades of scandals, coups, and wars orchestrated by USA (what Snowden and Assange revealed is only one episode of long list) didn't stop many (most?) US people from thinking that they're the "good people in the room" despite some mistakes.
Well, you've got a view that's in some ways refreshing since it's really far removed from what the mainstream narrative says. But we're either discussing subtly different topics, or I don't agree with your central point. Not entirely sure which.
Democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law mostly a facade that hides the real power structures regarding the most important questions of the world? If we decide that "the most important questions of the world" is something other than what the citizens of democracies really care about, then sure, you can run a supertanker through that rhetorical opening. There's plenty of space for dubious foreign policy that supports a small group of people, outside of the space of topics that most people care about. As long as the country in question is so rich that it can afford a powerful military with only a small fraction of its tax revenue. In that case, the foreign policy becomes just a budgetary rounding error that most people don't care about. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could arguably fit that definition. But the USA couldn't have afforded those (and maintained enough public support) if it wasn't stupidly rich compared to everyone else.
The reason rule of law, democracy and civil liberties won out over totalitarianism after World War two is that those values turn out to produce societies that have more economic power. Not that they're inherently morally superior, although I know what sort of society I'd prefer to live in. I'm ignoring for the moment that the Soviet Union was one of the victors; they wouldn't have been if the USA hadn't been shipping them an incredible amount of home-produced weapons and equipment. It's hard to understate the power of the incentive of retaining most of the value of the valuable thing you created.
Regarding Ukraine, if we accept the extreme view that the USA in fact deliberately managed to goad Putin the idiot into making the biggest strategic mistake of the 21st century (invading Ukraine), the mistake is still on Putin. I'll agree it wouldn't have been a nice thing to do, but the moral calculus isn't easy to untangle. Wars are hell, but I have no illusions about what moral transgressions Russia is capable of, and an expanding empire with great power is certainly not a force of great net good in the world. Maybe it could be a net force for good in general, just by default, if the progress of civilization does not stagnate. But it certainly could stagnate and make a net negative. And it's hard to believe it would do a better job than a civilization with great individual freedoms.
If the most important questions of the world are greater quality of life for everyone, sustainably, then Western values certainly play a role in achieving that. But the calculus would be a challenge to figure out. The majority of the world's population doesn't live in liberal democracies, after all. Most scientific and engineering achievement has come from liberal democracies, but it's not completely obvious if that's just because what became the liberal democracies had a big head start with industrialization.
For World war 2, the major winner who caused the most destruction for the nazi empire and made most of the sacrifices is the USSR, like the USSR or not (and I don't mostly) but that is the fact.
Now trying to make a direct relationship between Western prosperity and the "democracy" is very famous opinion (after all this the official ideology of US, and it's the brand/image that they want to sell to the world). But there are many different variables here, for example the west has a long history of colonialism that allowed them to make fortunes off the resources and the power of other people, even what looks like peacefull countries now, benefited from this.
I'm not saying that having freedom of speech is not necessary, but it's merely a catalyst. Actually USSR (and even Nazi Germany) made huge jumps in the scientific and technological fields but the western bloc won eventually. You can probably make a direct link between the US control over the oil industry (by means of very dirty wars and alliances, see for example KSA relation with the British Empire then the US).
There is a nice critic for the marxist prediction that the working class will make a revolution in the capitalist world and the working class is one unified entity in all the world, the critics said that this didn't happen because the colonialism allowed the capitalist regimes to give the working class in their countries more money / value that's extracted from the colonised countries. Now apply this logic to the western bloc and it you will have altrnative view, the western bloc is not ruling because it's democratic, and it's not stable becuase it has freedom of speech and not rich because of the magic of the free market, it's because of those countries being rich and able to control the other countries they were able to pump fortunes and make even the poor worker much better than his colleagues in the 3rd world countries.
If my prosperity and my cheap energy was dependent on making a war in a far place called the middle east and making alliances with any dirty tyranny there then I'll be more prepared to buy into the official propganda that we're going there to fight for our values.
So while technically there is good amount of freedom of speech, but in practice there is rarely deviation from the main narrative and even the alternative naratives are too weak or they're not radically different from the mainstream ones, this is one of the reasons that the west countries had been relatively stable, in our Third world countries we're always in active fight about the big choices to take so we're mostly on the edge of civil wars and revolutions and wars with external enemies.
P.S I'm really in no position to defend Russia, but just imagine that US faced similar danger on it's border similar to Russia with NATO backed Ukraine, actually no need to imagine, this happened multiple times From Cuba to Venezuela to many south american countries, the thing is the US in most cases didn't need to go into direct war instead it needed to orchestrate coups and civil wars and then convince the world it's all about democracy.
I'm familiar with the ideas you're summarizing here. There is no question that colonialism, explicit previously, implicit and less obvious recently, has made big contributions towards the wealth of Western countries. The question is how much.
Is it a critical ingredient? Do cheaper raw materials and cheaper labor for things we've previously done locally, make enough of a difference that in a fair competition, an economic system with much worse incentives and individual freedoms for keeping the fruits of one's labor, will actually do equally well as Western ideals?
I have concluded that this is not the case; we would still see countries with Western values as economically more powerful in such a scenario. They would be less wealthy than they are today, but not in a different league entirely. The colonialist strategies amplified the success, but were not a requirement.
I'm not convinced of the comparison to the situation in South America. St. Petersburg and Moscow are already a short IRBM flight from Estonia. NATO does not have five hundred years of history as an expansionist empire, Russia has. NATO does not have ambitions of expansion; countries threatened by Russia wish to join NATO for their security against invasions that have hundreds of years of precedent. The USA does not conquer other countries and ship their industrial surplus back home, Russia does.
But yes, USA has orchestrated coups and toppled well-functioning, locally-chosen governments. There are geopolitical analogies here, and I'm not as certain of the last point as I am of the first.
> I have concluded that this is not the case; we would still see countries with Western values as economically more powerful
We have many examples of countries doing very well in science research and technology development without necessarily adopting liberal democratic values, such as USSR, Nazi Germany, China (which is catching up very quickly even on advanced research topics despite it was on the edge of famine not so long ago), even small countries are doing very well given their situation (Sanctions and wars) such as Cuba & Iran. Actually most of the advancement in the history of humans happened under non-liberal/democratic civilizations. And for fighting poverty China pulled a relative miracle by pulling hundreds of millions of people from poverty (recently they declared the success of getting rid of extreme poverty in China).
> an economic system with much worse incentives and individual freedoms for keeping the fruits of one's labor, will actually do equally well as Western ideals
Ok this is about the "free market" myth (in my opinion), if we looked carefully we can see that most of the advancements happened because of wars (especially WW2) and governments funded programs (example: Internet, Space programs), attributing the majority of the advancements to the free market need serious evidence. Also you're underestimating the importance of the cheap resources, cheap labor and open markets this makes most of the difference. It's not only about that, the success of the US to attach it's currency to the oil industry allowed it to make free money just by controlling and "protecting" the oil sources (especially in Middle east)
It's important to say that of course the colonial countries are for sure they should have some advancement to be able to colonize other countries but the bar is relatively low in comparison the profits that can be made, and the positive feedback loop that kicks in.
> NATO does not have ambitions of expansion
USSR begs to differ, US gave the falling USSR guarantees that it won't expand to the east but it did, and it was planning to do this again in Ukraine probably.
> countries threatened by Russia wish to join NATO for their security
That's the point about coups and wars, it allows the US to change the regime by means of force and/or disinformation campaigns (or alliance with terrorists, such as AL-Qaeda) and then install puppet regime with ruling class that's has deep interests with the west and viola, that regime will voluntarily want to join the NATO and do most of what the US wishes. That's the point of being the strongest empire in the history, you have thousands of playing cards that you can use, and you still get to look like the good guy.
Also note that for example Ukraine was almost invented by Lenin (Ukraine didn't exist at the time), also many of the territories of eastern Ukraine has majorities or big minorities of Russian people so things are more nuanced than the mainstream narrative.
> NATO does not have five hundred years of history as an expansionist empire
Yes they just colonize whole continents and practically exterminate the whole native citizens, if we're talking about history.
Also UK, France, Belgium... are in the NATO should I say exactly what this means in the last 500 years?
> The USA does not conquer other countries and ship their industrial surplus back home
They're doing this right now, even in small occupied territories in eastern Syria (and you guessed it, it's the oil and wheat rich territories). Sure US doesn't always steal like that, but they protect the regimes in the Persian Gulf and they sell them weapons, they burn whole countries to the ground (Iraq, Korea, Vietnam), they force the economical structures on the countries (If you're in the orbit of the US, you can't sign meaningful deals with China, they use the UN organisations to force certain structure on the economies even for big countries), they sanction whole countries for decades (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nkorea...). They support apartheid regimes (S. Africa, Israel) and the list goes on. Actually any comparison of the US and any random Tyranny will almost always be in favor of the tyranny.
An example. Personal opinion. The so-called criminal justice system of the USA has a lot in common with slavery, and relatively to the population size probably has more of a negative effect on the quality of life of Americans than minority repression in China has on the Chinese. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
I drew this example and conclusion based on media sources in the free press of the West. One can draw some conclusions from that.